FCJ-117 Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media TheoryMatteo Pasquinelli

FCJ-118 Faulty TheoryMatthew Fuller

FCJ-119 Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P ProductionPhoebe Moore

This
issue is an exercise in media ecology that is paradoxically unnatural.
Instead of assuming a natural connection to the established tradition of
Media Ecology in the Toronto-school fashion of Marshall McLuhan, Neil
Postman, and the work of scholars involved in the Media Ecology
Association (http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecology/), our issue
stems from another direction; its theoretical orientation is more
inspired by the work of Felix Guattari and engages with several
overlapping ecologies that are aesthetico-political in their nature. It
stems from a more politically oriented way of understanding the various
scales and layers through which media are articulated together with
politics, capitalism and nature, in which processes of media and
technology cannot be detached from subjectivation. In this context,
media ecology is itself a vibrant sphere of dynamics and turbulences
including on its technical level. Technology is not only a passive
surface for the inscription of meanings and signification, but a
material assemblage that partakes in machinic ecologies. And, instead of
assuming that ‘ecologies’ are by their nature natural (even if
naturalizing perhaps in terms of their impact on capacities of sensation
and thought) we assume them as radically contingent and dynamic, in
other words as prone to change.

The concept of media ecology was
revived in 2005 by Matthew Fuller’s theoretically novel take on the
idea. His Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
set out to map the ‘dynamic interrelation[s] of processes and objects,
beings and things, patterns and matter’ (Fuller 2005: 2) in a culture
where the relation between materiality and information has been
redefined. Steering clear of earlier celebrations of media as
informational environments which dismiss any connection with the
physical as for example with the cyberculture of the 1980s and 1990s –
Fuller is keen to map out how we can develop a material vocabulary for
media ecological processes. The roots of such a vocabulary—that bends
itself to the intensive connections of pirate radios and voice, the
photographic medium and the Internet as well as such informational
entities as memes—come from Whitehead, Simondon, Nietzsche as well as
Guattari and contemporary writers such as Katherine N. Hayles. What
emerges is a different genealogy for theories of media ecology.

What
was demonstrated already in Fuller’s take on the concept was a special
appreciation of material practices involved in establishing the regimes
of media ecologies. Media ecologies are quite often understood by Fuller
through artistic/activist practices rather than pre-formed theories,
which precisely work through the complex media layers in which on the
one hand subjectivation and agency are articulated and, on the other
hand, the materiality of informational objects gets distributed,
dispersed and takes effect. Media ecological platforms can be seen to
range from network environments for philosophy and media activism as in
Rekombinant (http://www.rekombinant.org) to art platforms on the net
such as Runme.org (http://runme.org/). Related themes can be detected in
the various negotiations of nature being remixed, resurfaced,
revisualized or sonified through media environments. Examples include
Natalie Jeremijenko’s work, the Harwood-Yokokoji-Wright Eco Media
collaboration (featured in Parikka -this Issue), biological art projects
such as Amy Youngs’s The Digestive Table (2006,
http://hypernatural.com/digestive.html), the work of activist/artistic
groupings like Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men or the Wu Ming
foundation and various bioart projects of recent years. In all these
cases a dynamic media ecology is generated, incorporating natural,
technical and informational components and giving rise to singular
processes of subjectivation that are equally an essential part of the
media ecology. (more...)

In 2008, the Fibreculture Journal became a part of
the Open
Humanities Press , a key initiative in the development of the Open
Access journal community.

The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the
debate and discussions concerning a wide range of topics of interest.
These include the social and cultural contexts, philosophy and politics
of contemporary media technologies and events, with a special emphasis
on the ongoing social, technical and conceptual transitions involved.

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"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North Whitehead